Security

Washington, September 29, 2016--The United Nations Human Rights Council's annual resolution on journalist safety for the first time urges all states to release arbitrarily detained journalists. The resolution, co-sponsored by 87 countries and adopted today in Geneva, raises new concerns about mounting attacks on journalists during elections and calls for states to protect the confidentiality of journalist sources.

A rare and serious vulnerability in Apple's iOS operating system has been discovered by researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which today published a report detailing its findings. It is the first known remote iOS vulnerability of its kind. Disturbingly, the company behind malware designed to exploit the security flaw may have also helped target an investigative journalist in Mexico in 2015, Citizen Lab said.

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On July 23, I gave a presentation as part of the HOPE XI hacker conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. My talk, entitled "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Journalists?" described the challenges of protecting journalists in a world where journalism is no longer conducted only by professionals. I exhorted the technologists and developers in attendance to build tools which account for the distinctive needs of journalism and which protect their users when they are engaged in acts of journalism.

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Washington, July 22, 2016--The Pentagon no longer considers journalists operating independently of U.S. military forces as potential spies, terrorists, or saboteurs, according to U.S. military officials who have rewritten the military's Law of War Manual.

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By CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program and CPJ Technology Program

The mobile messaging app Telegram is popular in Iran, where citizens who have limited access to uncensored news and mainstream social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, use it to share and access information. But the app's estimated 20 million users in Iran, including those who use Telegram to report and communicate with sources, could be putting themselves at severe risk of data compromise, security experts warn.

CPJ is proud to announce our instance of SecureDrop, the anonymous submission system engineered to resist even nation-state surveillance. In a time of unprecedented, technologically-mediated threats to journalism both online and offline, CPJ's adoption of this state-of-the-art system will help us protect journalists who need help the most. There has never been a safer way to tell CPJ about press freedom violations anywhere in the world -- or request direct support when you're under fire for your reporting.

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The Committee to Protect Journalists is one of 35 press freedom groups calling on the U.N. General Assembly to appoint a Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for the Safety of Journalists as soon as possible. A joint letter from the groups proposes that the representative could work closely with the secretary-general to coordinate with U.N. bodies and member states to implement the U.N. Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity.

On February 11, 2011, as journalists were documenting the raucous celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square following the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the story took a sudden and unexpected turn. CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan, who was reporting from the square, was violently separated from her crew and security detail by a mob of men. They tore her clothes from her body, beat her, and brutalized her while repeatedly raping her with their hands. Logan was saved by a group of Egyptian women who berated her attackers until a group of Egyptian army officers arrived and took her to safety.

Ana Freitas, a 26-year-old Brazilian journalist who covers pop culture, recalled how she once had trouble convincing an editor at the news outlet YouPix to publish an article she had written about women and minorities being unwelcome on comment boards related to pop cultural videos, movies, comics or gaming.